


We Catch Sounds in the Dark

by ParadifeLoft



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Darkening of Valinor, F/F, Healing, Vanyarin culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-09
Updated: 2014-02-09
Packaged: 2018-01-11 16:23:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1175211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParadifeLoft/pseuds/ParadifeLoft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the Darkening occurs, Elenwe intends to leave Valinor to make a new life in Middle-earth, but her death and subsequent return to the place she left behind leaves her miserable, guilty, and feeling like an outsider where she'd once been at home. Amarie is no less affected by the events surrounding the Darkening, though her troubles are of a different nature entirely - but those differences allow the forging of a relationship that helps them to weather the difficulties that life has foisted upon them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Catch Sounds in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [IdleLeaves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IdleLeaves/gifts).



> Written for the 2014 My Slashy Valentine fic exchange.
> 
> With many thanks, as always, to the lovely beta-ing talents (and confidence-boosting talents) of [Zaatar](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Zaatar/pseuds/Zaatar), without whom my prose would likely be as opaquely overwrought as the jewelry of an extremely tacky Noldo ;)
> 
> A few notes on language - First Age Quenya (or Quendya, as it may be, though I don't believe any of the words used within are those that would have different pronunciations between the two) is used to refer to names of characters, places, groups, and so forth, hence the appearance of the tilde over the N in "Ñoldor", which thus makes an "ng" sound. Likewise, the perspective being that of a Vanya, the actual name "Vanyar" is not used, but rather "Minyar" instead, as that is their own name for themselves that they retain from the time of the elves' Awakening.

Valimar, gleaming spires brushed with gold atop Ingwe's palace, sang with voices and clattering footsteps and the far harp-notes of a poet in the village square as Elenwe strolled through the marketplace. Pleasant as her library desk and the scrolls and accounts she'd been looking through for the past week were, the bustle of people on the roads, the shopkeepers and street philosophers she stopped to chat with - she'd sorely missed that even if her time without had been so short.

As she stepped away from one booth with a smile, promising the artisan that she'd send her younger brother to come look at her painted pottery, she caught a glimpse of a face and a gait she knew certainly well enough.

"Amarie!" Elenwe called out, laughing. The other woman turned at the sound of her name, and a sweet smile rose on her face. "Do you fare well?" Elenwe asked, when she'd caught up to her to be within polite enough a distance for conversation. She certainly looked it, as far as she was concerned; simple dress in silver with a slightly unusual manner of hanging from her shoulders - but other ornamentation on her person as well!

Elenwe took the several paces between them with a slight skip, until she was close enough to see the faint dusting of gold light sparkling from the facets of the other woman's jewelry. She touched an earring hanging from Amarie's lobe; the cluster of silver-embedded jewels swung slightly when she removed her finger. "Your prince certainly spoils you! I might have mistaken you for a Ñoldo!"

That was how Elenwe had seen her most recently, of course - at the ceremony announcing Amarie's formal betrothal, chosen and confirmed by herself and her golden Ñoldo prince from the arrangement made between their parents however many decades ago.

"You like it?" replied Amarie, with a smile and a tilt of her head. Glancing upward to recall a memory, she stated, "They are - tanzanite, with aquamarine and golden beryl." The words were pronounced very precisely, with a hint of a Tirion-esque accent, as if quoting exactly the words of the jewelsmith who would have sold them.

She'd been shyly proud of the planned betrothal when Elenwe had dragged it out of her, back when they were still children, young ladies-in-waiting of the Princess Nahámenis and Amarie newly-arrived from her family's villa outside Valimar. But otherwise, scarce interested in the interpersonal intrigues of court when there were other pursuits to be had, at least at the time - Elenwe remembered how often she'd smuggled sheets of vellum into her chambers after poetry sessions, plucking at notes on a harp and scrawling sarati until her hands were splotched and she was chased off to attend her other tasks.

"It is very lovely," Elenwe agreed, and then, "But do you plan to take up hobbies to match your new jewels too? Will I expect to see you getting your hands all stained with ash from a forge, rather than ink!"

Amarie gave a small laugh, and lowered her eyes; the earrings swung again, and the silver string of glimmering stones about her neck shifted against golden skin. "No, no, poetry and gardens are still quite suitable."

"Mm, yes, I imagine." She stepped beside her with a glance, falling into place beside Amarie as they strolled the basked cobblestones, giving occasional attention to the various merchants calling out to them. "But can I not convince you of a visit to the royal library, when it might strike your fancy? - Yes, besides simply the volumes of poetry; the histories and philosophies are all several rooms over."

A returning glance after several moments still and hollowed with naught but air. It was polite and considering, Amarie's eyes that deliberate sort of relaxed and her lips curled up in a slight smile. She held her hand with the backs of her fingers just brushing the far side of her neck. "I shall see what I can do, then."

 

\----

 

"You're here to see my _brother_?"

Pale lamplight swathed Amarie's face white and blue where she stood holding the lamp before her, base clutched tightly in her hand as one of Yavanna's handmaidens would grasp a fruit-grail during the holy days' ceremonies. Not an unapt comparison, though to put this lesser - if now vital - creation of Feanáro's in the place of that of the Valar, rather than even his greatest coming _from_ theirs… well now Elenwe’s thoughts found true impiety, to list among the rest of her defiances.

She tried not to let her thoughts stray to those two blackened husks withered with poison, but a mild sickness curled in her stomach and up to her chest even so. She wondered if Amarie's white-blue glow was as much a function of pallor, similarly sick, as the hue of the lamplight.

"Yes, your brother is why," Amarie murmured, knuckles going white for a fraction of a moment, and her voice suggested a truth to that notion. Elenwe could not tell if she met her eyes, or simply stared past them. "We spoke by chance at one of the vigils recently, and tonight I thought I might find him an ear sympathetic to one whose betrothed will be leaving to follow the rest of the Ñoldor."

Frost gathered at the tips of her words, but Elenwe only stiffened, drawing her shoulders back.

"I've had family and friends enough tell me I am wrong to do exactly that," she said. "Say what you like about me, but pray do it elsewhere. I am tired of hearing it. And I do not _follow_ my husband, lest you were thinking to make that accusation, but rather the other way around."

Amarie tilted her head and her mouth twitched; the light of the lamp did likewise. A loose curl of hair that, too, scarce looked golden any longer, fell across her collarbone. "Such was not my intent. As if I expected to convince you otherwise…"

She paused briefly, lips tightening. Her manner remained cold. "He says he will return. And tells me to wait, as if I have not done so and will not continue to; as if it is I who should wait upon him, while he heeds not his own advice when it comes to those greater in wisdom and power than any of the Eldar."

Elenwe's face surely spoke of her surprise - such anger was unlike the Amarie she'd known before - but she was of no great mind to chastise herself for that display of surprise, nor hide it. An unlovely flaw, impolite and unbecoming; but such were all the days now, and the very fabric of their land - a fleeting smile slipped against her cheeks. Perhaps with the place they had grown such manners to fit lost, it was the greater piety to lose the manners themselves as well.

"Should you not perhaps remove the need for him to wait?" she murmured, delicately. "I see small enough life for you here, same as myself - follow and you shall not be beholden to a world that has been destroyed with no hope for recreation, and keep your prince as well."

The anger that flared in Amarie's eyes, sparks in a face like a bodiless spirit out of a song, gave the reaction Elenwe could not say she hadn't anticipated… yet nor for the reason she would have assumed.

"I was made aware that this course of action was not allowed to me before I had even considered it. You do me no favours in your suggestion."

How many possibilities sprung into bloom then; new flowers of the Darkening to replace those now wilting and dead without their treelight shine? Fury at Elenwe herself, with the prohibition tossed between them so as to dissuade any further questions? At the constraining of her choices regardless of what her ultimate wish might have been? - but she had grown too close to Tirion, the city her people had but _once_ shared. Such a thought went amiss in this Valimar, even changed as it had become.

It was the third notion that Elenwe turned to spoken words; the others brooked no further discussion, through politeness or through courtesy. "The point of leaving, as it were, could perhaps be stated as rejection of those who would promise safety and joy, and leave us with neither," she said tartly. "And if you wish to leave but are forbidden, do those who forbid not become themselves complicit?"

But Amarie appeared less inclined to such a response than likely either of the others. Her hand shook; the planes of her face played with shadows as would an illusionist showing his artistry at court. "I advise you return with such words to those who would appreciate them better than any you are like to find in this house," she replied. Her lips were tight.

Elenwe's eyebrows lifted by a fraction; she pushed disappointment far to the back of her chest, enough that it might brush against ribs. The shadows and those casting them played silence for a space of time.

"This remains my own house as well as my brother’s, as yet," she said, finally, voice low and not cleared of its tinge of regret.

Amarie herself did not break that silence, when she raised level her chin and went through the door, two curls of near-colour-bleached hair spilling in the lamplight from beneath her mourning veil.

 

\----

 

The ice had shone white under the stars that twinkled from afar in the sky, the land of legends from her pages of lore greeting them home again. _Welcome_ , they say, _but you cannot come back to us any more easily than you departed_. Twilight ruled the Outer Lands, and they were not a selfless deity.

At least on the ice Elenwe saw no twisted mimicries of shadows, once caught and sculpted beautifully from the light of the Trees, now a mangled scattering of hard lines where there should have been soft and soft where there should have been hard. No deference paid to the designs inlaid to compliment them in the tiled floors of Ingwe's palace. On the ice, it was not their own works turned against them.

Was it better this way? Ingwe; Nahámenis his sister and Queen Consort Calminye; their children princes and princesses adopted and natural of the Minyar and Queen Indis of the Ñoldor; all in white and gold and silver upon the front dais as they had sat when Elenwe left - and she could see them through the same haze she could see all the court, but the voices they spoke with passed unheard through ears that felt deafened. Formalities of introduction, altered to suit a fea already given these honours once before; lines telling of her merciful pardon given by the Valar that had brought her to a body anew, for _her_ sins, the queen said, could not be as grievous, driven by none of the same events, as those of the _Ñoldorin_ exiles…

She saw skepticism in the faces around her, when they were not a blur as unintelligible as their mingled voices. Piety was one thing; trust in their chief of chieftans yet another… they held firm enough, but Elenwe could not believe it was but her fractured mind, last in a fractured body like fractured ice, that she saw more than one inner core of hope turned alike to the shadows.

They should not have brought her back. Not _here_ , the fire in her spirit snapped, a piece of her spirit that refused to accept that she’d not see the Outer Lands as she had so contrived. But from _outside_ , from the faces gathered around and bodies shifting in a sea, silks and linens not  with frost… you bring back our wayward daughter and that is just; but grief alone cannot sustain us all with one thing Marred now Whole, but not the rest. ( _Where are our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, our parents?_ she could almost hear, from those around her who had made the journey opposite that she herself had attempted. For a fraction of time, as she ascended the dais herself, her dazed eyes caught the Queen's. _My mother died for this; and she could not be granted another body as well? What were her sins?_ Histories Elenwe should not have been reading. She snapped her gaze away.)

Ingwe stood as she approached. Elenwe could not say she'd ever been torn between serenity and lingering grief to describe a man's face; nor had she heard of it in any poetry that now danced along the edge of her ears- the poets, she thought, must then renew their subjects and their melodies of words, for such a thing was clearly in need.

It was a thought in black ink against pristine paper, lofted clear above the murky cloud that was the rest of her mind. No less unsettling; a certain familiar comfort in stark white, but the comfort simply of familiarity was no such true thing at all.

Before her king, Elenwe bowed and knelt, until the fine skirts she'd been dressed in pooled about her bare legs. Lord Ingwe's hands were smooth against her own, as though never marred by spear-bearer's calluses the way she'd imagined. He sat at the feet of the Lord of the Airs, with his lord's winds spears enough now. She pressed her lips to the tips of his fingers, and shivered as her hair brushed her shoulders.

Each step back down the dais had her convinced the floor would open to yawn wide, and snap closed to crush her back beneath countless layers.

She wobbled, a tiny step to the left of center at the floor. The ceremony had concluded, and she was - herself again. Elenwe of Valimar. Not herself. She _turned_ left this time, away from the King and the Queen and the Princess; the Prince and his sister queen; for her _peers_ at least had not yet become more than a blur.

A hand slipped inside her own, unawares, and an anchoring line cut from it, steady, through the fog.

"Elenwe. You look - "

The words were silenced. Elenwe looked to the side - that face, this one came into focus. Angry, last she'd seen it… but the tension drawn through her slipped slightly away; she was not one of those who saw: symbol. Not person. "I look as if I do not belong here," Elenwe finished. Matter-of-fact.

Amarie gave a slight shake of her head, just a slow motion, though her eyes stayed on Elenwe's. They were… wide. Not frightened, but concerned. To notice it as an oddity… a luxury, Elenwe almost felt, a luxury like a soft bed. "You look… shocked."

She looked around, at the dark of the shadows, the muted colours of rich garb unsoiled; thought of the white of the ice. So many people, so much more space taken and crowded with presence.

"Yes," she murmured finally. "I believe that is true."

 

\----

 

Rarely in Valimar, in _Valinor_ , as Elenwe recalled it, had laments been any subject of widespread attention - why put beauty to sorrow, and so diminish it to half what it would otherwise have been, when so much flourished around that otherwise would only sharpen it? But something of the character of Valinor's people had changed when its Trees had been blotted from the earth, and it was simply a truth that the Eldar had ever sought knowledge in words, and understanding in song.

No, she did not dispute the origin of such a crowd as stood about her (uniform cuts of cloth woven in intricacies to appear simple, all draped over golden-brown skin and adorned by veils of mourning over hair like cruelly-lost Laurelin). But to see so many so assembled, to assuage their griefs and knit sundered hearts back together through this song, letting the counterpoints form false bandages and blankets over a world beneath them, still ripped apart and untended…

_Do not be absurd, Elenwe_ , her parents' tiny gestures had said of her reluctance to attend this recital. _As if it might be even the slightest bit acceptable to not attend the first performance of the Lady Elemmíre's newest composition, let alone one of such a subject matter…_ Not a beat missed, and she assured them she hesitated only due to promising her company to another for the duration of the event. Amarie, she called upon the next day.

"We should take our seats," Amarie murmured, as the crowd began to trickle into their places rank dictated. The press of her fingers was soft against Elenwe's arm; the white and grey of the dress she wore shone a warm silver with the reflections of twin lights from the stage. Ilúvatar help them all.

They settled themselves on the cushions arrayed without any further words; Elenwe found her gaze drifting to the other private boxes lining the upper ring of the theatre, where sat other noble houses of the Minyar; their royal household… she glossed, almost, over the Ñoldor in the next box over, so numbed by golden hair until she saw that of red and brown and black - her counterparts, marriage's cousins and mothers. Tirion's scattered princesses, drawn back together in this net of a ceremony that had snared her too without even the decency of placing her among them.

She inhaled, stung, and looked away.

"You wish you were with them." Beneath the silver mesh, Amarie's eyes rested upon Elenwe; direct, still. A slight tilt of her lashes; her hand twisting over once in her lap, shifting lines in the material. "No - with their kin."

"And you find such thought anathema," Elenwe replied, tone even and dulled with resignation. "I did not ask you bring it up."

"You brought it up yourself when you spent such a look there."

The music had begun in low notes of several harps entwined, and a hushed chorus put words to what they would have all the people of Valinor make of the events they would tell. Vána, came the invocation, and Nessa; sing of the bliss of Valinor and the Eldar within it; and come Nienna to catch our tears and our mourning and make us new once again.

When Elenwe looked over once more, Amarie was crying.

But her face became stern as hard glass at the gaze, even through the wet pinch of her eyes and stained cheeks. She did not wish Elenwe's pity; did not even turn to face her instead of the stage below when she spoke. "I once held my own life and future beautiful, full of shining light, and then I see that snuffed out sure as any darkness. None would stay in this place that should have been home to them; they would abandon me and I am given nothing like a choice of my own to go with them. I am given to a grief that is naught but motions of another's fea; my own has no words in it."

Her eyes tightened shut, and she trembled. "Let me at least have this grief belonging to us all, if I am not free to my own. Lady Nienna willing it."

Elenwe had no words in herself, either, and yet she needed none, to entwine the fingers of their nearest hands. To reach to Amarie's face, cup her cheek and pull her close against her own breast.

The music shrieked notes that should not come from any voice or craft of the Eldar, and the facsimile of the Trees sputtered and dimmed. Amarie's head bowed like supplication, her tears wet the fabric of Elenwe's dress until Elenwe shuddered with it; until she was near to crying herself, a figure mirrored.

_Our world is diminished and I can do nothing of that fact_ , she thought. Her eyes were clear and yet stung, pricked by the voices about her, by the blood and the cold and the _dead_ \- how many more would die while she sat here ripped from them, absolved of all sins and given back with no visible raiment that of inaction to hang tied about her heart? How it choked her.

In the dark and the sudden hushed silence, she cradled Amarie against her, hand tangled in a fall of golden hair and the other squeezing her fingers tight.

Amarie could not leave to follow now, no more than Elenwe could, caught tight in this place once more with none to lead her way now, choice erased as if it had never been made.

When subdued harmonies of the chorus arose lingering in the air once more, Elenwe added her own voice to that song. "I shall not abandon you," she murmured. The sound of it slipped between them, around them, tight knots of lacework woven like fate.

Wounds came not only from others' inaction, but from one's own.

"I shall not abandon you."

 

\----

 

Great were the skills of the Maiar of Aule; but the full power of creation, the greatest beauty of arts, were given to the Eldar, under tutelage that kindled their inherent potential - and a portion of the Ñoldor, a larger one of the Aulendur, had chosen still to remain in Valinor. It was these people Elenwe saw lining the halls of Aule's crafting chambers when she came to the Vala's home.

The lord of crafts she did not see herself; no doubt he stayed further inside, with their most precious treasures now that so many final hopes had been pinned upon them. One last chance for the light to fall upon their land, even no longer pure as it had become - and all who would help to fashion such vessels for the Trees' last fruits had attended the Valar’s call.

Elenwe herself had no such skills of hand; even among the Ñoldor she'd remained content with historical research, the management of an estate; what rudiments of lightwork and song, poetics and textiles and athletics as were taught to any self-respecting child of the Minyar.

But her conscience could not sit by and simply allow the fashioning of that one thing that the Valar would provide to their forsaken people, without her helping craft it as well. It was thus that she gave a bow to the master craftsman of the chamber, and presented herself to whatever tasks the Ñoldor there might require.

Keep the fires burning at just the proper temperature; fetch the ores needed and the paints and brushes for filigree - Elenwe's dress soon became dulled with the accumulated dust of a good dozen people intent upon their crafts, each some part or portion of what would become chariots for the journeys of the Trees' fruits.

She was thankful that it was not only the suggestion to attend, that Amarie had given her, but also the suggestion to wear less fine and less flowing of clothing. "When you have been inside the studio of a sculptor, you know better than to let good cloth touch any portion of such a room, and that includes the air inside it," she had noted, with a faint, amused smile. Elenwe knew better than to disregard it.

And odd as it was to admit, after what she had so recently endured, it was true that this labour tired her - more than once in the day did she look with a certain envy upon an apprentice shaping copper or gold, mixing it with steel; a pair consisting of an elf and a Maia setting enchantments to completed pieces that they would not melt under the fruits' radiance; a woman dark as any Vanya but with tight-curled Noldo-black hair, drawing coloured designs of glass into larger panes for the chariots' windows, that they would refract the light to most beautifully illuminate the heavens.

Grief could stay with them, but it could not rule, either in stagnancy and refusal to act, or in acting to deny any change. Elenwe's soreness with her tasks was a price paid well to transform that grief.

Amarie hovered at the doorstep to the great workshop, once the hours had flowered and receded, and the water in Aule's elaborate clepsydra flowed to day's end. A vision of beauty, spotless and ephemeral like song after a day among so many crafting studios - captivating, the crafts of the Ñoldor certainly were once finished, but their making had left her feeling heavy, far too weighted by heat and sound and solidity.

And even so.

"Your advice was sound," Elenwe murmured. They had met with a greeting smile and a small period of silence, appreciation without words for what transpired. A few steps taken to exit the compound, before they stopped, in some unspoken mutual understanding - backs to Aule's halls, they looked out on the hillsides surrounding. Amarie's shoulder rested against her own - or perhaps the other way around? But she was warm, a certain comfort to return to after an exertion both physical and mental.

Lamps from Aule's halls lit the grasses pale, with a cloak of dusky starlight about the distant trees and the pair of their mingled shadows beside the walls.

"Will you be glad to see them?"

Amarie turned, questioning. "The Trees' fruits? It is a strange thought, to see the light traveling. But I shall." She leant her head back, as if mapping the path the new lights would take across their heavens - would they eclipse the stars, as the Trees had?

Elenwe thought of tracing her jawline, as Amarie traced her pattern in the sky.

"It still does not feel like enough," she confessed, after a moment. "It is something. I am not simply _passive_ , but it is a healing to something besides my being returned here. That still holds bitterness." Her thoughts were the ice, even now - especially now. Turn away, now abandoned, and be received back into the grace of the Valar… and here she, not received but shoved, unable to reach those she should have suffered with.

What a strange feeling, to hope the fruits would heal her, while knowing they would not.

But Amarie shook her head, beside her, eyes lined thoughtfully. "Fate does not accord all things to answer others. There is simply not... there is no peace in it, to match action and counteraction against one another, rather than seeking a new realm to shape while what has been done comes to acceptance."

They were soothing words, with care and wisdom and the solution Elenwe should desire. But Elenwe could see her histories before her; could see the very land of Valinor stretched before her eyes, the creation of such principles, and now... It had not been preserved by them. How could one create a perfection able to be destroyed, after all? Abruptly, she began a long stride from the compound where they'd lingered; Amarie followed at a glance. There was no guilt in her heart for her thoughts, but they were too heretical for her comfort in thinking them next to a Vala's home, nonetheless.

"The sentiment entwines itself too closely with avoidance for my comfort," she said as they walked. "A peace that leaves marrings untouched below the surface... I do not trust that such a peace will not be scraped away, or that they will not flourish like rot until none of it is suitable any more."

When she looked at Amarie, for a fraction of a moment, she saw lamplight once more; lamplight in a dark like pitch, and flames threatening to burst free from her heart.

 

\----

 

The first rays of dawn's light peeking through the curtains, once a disorientation and a burst of gladness together each morning, seemed more often now to make Elenwe gladder that she need not play hostess, than anything more profound. Amarie liked to rise early; Elenwe was fond, she had to admit, of her feathered mattress and soft, light bedclothes. Still lying amidst the pillows, she stretched to sprawl out into far more of the bed than she needed, encroaching upon the still-warm sheets where Amarie had lain. There was a hint of flowers in her scent there.

Elenwe's eyes had drifted shut once more when she felt the brush of hair against her shoulder from above; she opened them to see Amarie bent over her, loose curls of gold in a tumble about her shoulders and only slightly restrained by a single clasp in back, an amused indulgence in her expression.

"Simply because I am willing to arrange a breakfast made and brought for you as well, hardly means I am about to serve it to you while you are _in_ the bed, you know," she murmured.

Elenwe propped herself upon one elbow; sure enough, in the outer chamber, she could see a platter with several morning plates arranged for the pair of them.

With a slightly exaggerated sigh of acquiescence, she folded the sheets aside to free her legs - though when she sat and swung them over the side of the bed, she was summarily kept from standing all the way, tying her dressing gown closed, by the soft fingers the tilted her chin, the lips that lowered left a slow kiss upon her own.

A thought drifted for a moment, idle wonderings of a peacefully blank, idle mind - whether Amarie loved her, as one betrothed or married might… she'd not, after all, tied her own soul to any permanent bond, and there had been, so far as Elenwe knew, no others since. A few hundred years was a long time, after all.

She kissed her back, and tucked the thought away with a hope that it was not the case - as was most likely true, when she did not let her imagination meander away with itself. Such dalliances were common enough and did not lend themselves to ties like marriage. But even so, it was her own wish that Amarie’s love was not of such a nature, selfish a wish as it was - for how poorly she might return such a love! _She_ , after all, was no tragic king to find fading her affections, once pledged and bonded, fea intertwined with another's.

Amarie's hips were round, soft, beneath Elenwe's hands, sheer fabric of her dress tugged into tiny creases sliding about her frame; Elenwe rose to stand, and then it was Amarie who needed to tilt her head as they finished the kiss.

"Very well then, I am out of bed; and you have promised me... a banquet, have you not?" She looked at the other woman with a pretend expression of total earnestness, as though truly expecting a fully set table to be brought now right before her. Amarie's eyes widened for a fraction of a second, before her lips curled up and she could not help but giggle.

Elenwe turned, feigning disappointment - "Ah, but if you haven't a banquet then must I find some other pursuit of more worthiness to take its place?" And Amarie took her meaning immediately, even before the brush of fingers to the small of her back; of course she did - hard not to recognise a thing you'd grown in another, revived its soil and lavished with water and light - treelight, sunlight, moonlight… had it become enough, in place of what she'd wished to give, once, still? Dearest friend, companion.

"An appetiser, now," Amarie demurred, slipping her hand against Elenwe's and pulling her toward the outer room with its waiting meal, "and if you should like, a _banquet_ , later."

Not in place of, she amended. Not in place of.

 

\----

 

"You should go and speak with him."

Amarie's voice was low, subdued compared to the feverish buzz of all Eldamar outside Elenwe's walls. Pink-orange dusk lent an energy that hummed beneath the surface of the cities, of the very air, waiting to burst forth in the full light of the next day to some jubilant celebration. How the mood had shifted, from but a few centuries prior…

Within the courtyard, the remnants of light faded shadows purple and blue, throwing sharp relief onto Amarie's features and giving only the tiniest glint to her hair, to the cord of white-gold and emeralds about her collar. One small haven of quiet from the press of accumulated thoughts.

"Elenwe, you should. How many other people here have any idea… They couldn't! We couldn't. Not any of it, not death, not coming _back_..."

She was silent for a moment, brows drawn in and mouth scrunched in worry, other unhappinesses.

"I _saw_ you, when you were first returned, if you cannot remember; I saw you angry and grieving, and in the _court_ , that first time, you must remember, something… And you were not the son of a king."

Elenwe sighed, unable to look at the other woman properly. "And you think I might simply come to a man in such a state and make common cause, as though what we have gone through is the same?" She shook her head, biting at her own lips, pressing them together. " You do not know how the years _change_ , in the Outer Lands. What a gulf so wide I can scarce imagine, between myself and any I should see anew now, even a closest friend - and you so perfectly forget _guilt_ , Amarie. As though I would be anything but a reminder of failure, to drive the knife-point further in than even this land itself could manage."

The stillness of a proper composed posture she'd retreated into itched beneath her legs and the soles of her feet, at the base of her spine and the inside of her ribs. She longed for movement - she had always longed for movement, especially when the world split and yawned wide as a chasm that she could not but fall into, lest what ills remained at her back consume her.

"He is _your_ betrothed, _meldenya_ ," Elenwe said. She could not keep a note of pleading from her voice.

But Amarie shook her head as well, then; she could see it from the corner of her eye. "When I told you we had broken off the engagement I had not meant only temporarily," she said. "And my purpose when I saw him was not to renew it, not in such a manner.

"He worried that I would wish to, you know. That I would wish to and he would have to decline and lose me permanently, in his need for… for whatever time it might take him, to become… well. Or moreso, than now."

Wind rustled the leaves of overhanging trees, the flowers that had began to grow beside them; bells in the palace's towers sounded in the distance. But was that not precisely her own point, that there would be no such similarity between them as Amarie claimed? For Elenwe, despite all else, had not been occupied with thoughts of _life_ here, or how she might miss it; had not thought herself _unwell_ …

In all the time she had spent at court in the intervening years, borrowing the ears of her fellows and the musicians who had their own spheres of influence and the king's family, even - all her efforts were to bring the attentions of Valinor to the Outer Lands and their own kindred there. She had no notion of how to provide the opposite; a refuge from those lands in a place that she still could not see as such.

And so she said. Haltingly, with little grace to it, but Amarie heard her until the words slowed and stopped. "I have not done well by those I had once already sought to aid," Elenwe finished. Her tongue felt heavy with regret. "It is simply not a role I can take, to think to give him some help the way you wish."

Amarie's hands twisted together in her lap for several moments, brows pressing in with consideration. "It is not true," she said finally. "The topic becomes the Outer Lands again and you forget suddenly all you have done here, or else it had never registered to you at all. But it must have, else neither of us would be here as we are today! _Neither_ of us could have become whole again! What will it take to keep you from forgetting?"

Tears welled in Elenwe's eyes before she could say, even, why they might have come at all. It was not a sadness; something else powerful and entering deep into her breast, buried beneath skin and muscle and nestling curled around her heart. She wished to say something, but the words would not form themselves to her.

"If I'd had the chance to decide truly, I would have chosen to stay." As the concept was quiet, so were the words Amarie spoke, after a time. Her hands, she had stopped them twisting in upon each other; now her fingers soft and comforting entwined with Elenwe's own. "I had told him when he asked me to go, that it was my choice to stay, but it was… they were just words, angry words and I cannot even say how much I hated the thought that would make them true. Feared it. And I cannot bear you forgetting what you have done for me.

Whatever the feeling, stayed wrenched inside Elenwe's breast; but the tears seemed to find no more wish to continue. Her cheeks remained wet. Mind turning of its own accord, scattering to a hundred fragments of thoughts at once, Amarie's words seemed to draw a coalescence of the centuries up from accumulated memory - no, she could not forget; and she _did_ not forget. One could see only a single light through the passage of the Calacirya; but step from beneath the stone and the entire sky filled itself with stars.

Would she give such an answer, such a denial born of fear herself, if, when, she saw Turukáno or Itarille emerge from Námo's halls? How meaningless would be all she had done if that was the response she chose.

"Thank you," Elenwe said - abrupt, perhaps, though soft. She held tight to the fingers entwined in her own. "I - I do promise you then, I shall do what I can, and - pray it is well-done. Ah, _meldenya_ , I am afraid though myself, for what will come if this is only but the first instance. It is nothing like what I'd imagined."

Amarie turned Elenwe's palm over in her own, traced the lines in it for several moments without speaking. "I take it that is why we are here," she answered, eventually. "Indirectly addressing, or so I have considered, rather than direct response. I know you don't…"

But Elenwe shook her head, and closed her other hand over Amarie's. "I had not believed in any peace to be found there once; I still would not apply it in all places. But I cannot deny the value, not any more."

And she wouldn't, she realised. The thought did not hurt her as it once had. Energy to fight, so she'd desired, once - and still now, too. Still now, she thought, she had received it - and without so much of a cost.


End file.
